Yeah, those people can f*** right off.
I have taken care of elderly sick parents while parenting my children and it is unbelievably hard. You are doing the absolute best you can do from a distance. I agree with the others that your parents and grandparent will likely need to move to receive additional support. That will be hard as heck too.
You are doing amazing. Do not feel bad for even one second.

Just stay in Flagstaff. We stayed there a few years ago when we visited the Grand Canyon and I think it was about a 45 minute drive to the Visitor's Center. It wasn't bad at all. Flagstaff is a college town and had some nice restaurants and was not full of tourists all the time. There may be a better choice of hotels (we had 3 little kids at the time; you will be looking for a different hotel experience than I was). There is a planetarium there that we visited too.
Your trip sounds amazing! We visited The Great Salt Lake on another trip and that experience is family legend. There are a lot of flies.

I grew up in a small town in Illinois in the 1980s and VERY VERY VERY few of the boys who were accused (yes, that's the word) of being gay were able to do anything but firmly deny it. Absolutely no kid Will's age, with his life experiences and trauma, would have been open about that. He might not even "know" it himself yet, but he WOULD know the boys in town who were more like Billy would have eaten him alive if they thought he was gay. So yeah, I find this realistic.

Are you on Pinterest? I just searched "kids summer activities" and there are a lot of pins with crazy activities they can do at home. You would want to make a plan to ensure you have the materials you need, but you should be able to come up with some special activities.
Example: Each child make a volcano out of clay (or home made play doh) on one day. When it is dry (a few days later), each child paints their volcano. Then, when they paint is dry on a subsequent day they can either erupt their volcanos with vinegar and baking soda, or add D & D figurines for an imaginary play quest (or whatever it is called in D & D). Also, if you make a theme out of this, if you make chocolate cupcakes and position them upside down, they have a volcano shape and you can tint frosting to look like lava. Kids bake the cupcakes and can frost their own cupcakes and that is a project unto itself.
Good luck! My kids are 10 years older than yours and this era is over for me. I miss it.

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